Rich by Coin

The year 2025 saw consolidation among major layer-1 networks, laying the groundwork for interoperability and real-world financial use cases. Ethereum saw renewed institutional adoption and steady progress on scaling, while builders increasingly framed interoperability as the key challenge heading into 2026. Solana also began 2025 with stress-testing the network under real demand, aiming to harden its infrastructure for deeper financial use cases. Together, these dynamics offer a snapshot of how the industry’s leading platforms are positioning themselves for the next wave of adoption and for bridging on-chain infrastructure with everyday financial utility.

Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, described the trend as unification, predicting that 2026 will bring siloed ecosystems back together to create a fast, cost-efficient, and truly interoperable experience for users and institutions alike. He warned against an overemphasis on gambling-driven activity and urged applications that solve real financial problems at scale, including access to tokenized equities and globally accessible neobank-style banking services. Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito Labs, said Solana in 2025 became “super buttery smooth” with faster performance and meaningfully more capacity as block space grew roughly 25%. Bruder also noted that Solana’s long-promised role as a high-throughput financial network began to materialize, with 2025 fueling a decentralized NASDAQ-like vision.

Jito’s BAM product aimed to reshape Solana’s blockspace economy by making transaction sequencing more transparent, delivering better applications, better pricing for users, and a better user experience. Bruder described Alpenglow, the long-anticipated upgrade to Solana’s consensus mechanism, as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, which should materially improve reliability while sharply reducing confirmation times. Today, Solana transactions typically take 12 to 13 seconds to fully finalize; under Alpenglow, finalization could drop to around one second, meaning transactions become effectively irreversible almost immediately. This upgrade is less about incremental performance gains and more about solidifying Solana’s role as the infrastructure layer for a “truly decentralized NASDAQ.”